Lewis Hamilton will head to Miami with at least one less variable on his desk: Carlo Santi is set to remain on the seven-time world champion’s Ferrari pitwall as race engineer when the 2026 season resumes.
That matters more than it sounds. Ferrari’s year has already been chopped up by circumstance — three races run, then a five-week pause after the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grands Prix were scrubbed from the calendar. For a driver still building the kind of hard-wired, shorthand communication that wins you time on a Sunday, continuity can be worth more than another day in the sim.
Hamilton arrived at Ferrari with enough spotlight to melt carbon fibre, and 2025 didn’t help. It was his first podium-less season in F1, and the radio traffic with then race engineer Riccardo Adami became part of the weekly storyline, the sort of public friction that makes everything feel heavier than it needs to be. Ferrari acted quickly. Adami was moved into a new role, and Santi — known in Maranello as Kimi Raikkonen’s former race engineer — was brought back to trackside duty after a stint at the factory.
The expectation in the paddock has been that Santi’s return was a stopgap. Cedric Michel-Grosjean has been widely tipped as the longer-term solution for Hamilton’s side of the garage after arriving from McLaren, where he most recently served as Oscar Piastri’s lead trackside performance engineer.
But sources close to the situation indicate Santi will stay in place for Miami on May 3, with no defined timeline for when a handover to Michel-Grosjean will happen.
In a way, it fits with what Hamilton himself was hinting at during pre-season testing. He didn’t dress it up: swapping race engineers midstream can cost you momentum, especially in a year when teams and drivers are already having to learn fresh habits around 2026’s energy-management demands.
“It’s actually quite a difficult period, because it is not long term,” Hamilton said in February. “The solution that I currently have, it’s only going to be a few races.
“So early on into the season, it’s going to be switching up again and I’ll have to learn to work with someone new, so that’s detrimental to me.”
Miami, then, becomes a useful checkpoint. Hamilton’s start to 2026 has been steadier than the noise around his first Ferrari season might suggest: fourth in Australia, sixth at Suzuka, then a first Ferrari podium with third in China. It’s not the stuff of title runs yet — Mercedes has owned the opening phase of the year — but it has been enough to shift the mood from damage-limitation to something more constructive.
Ferrari has been working through the downtime, too. Hamilton was back in the SF-26 at Fiorano for a two-day Pirelli tyre test on Thursday and Friday, his first time in the car since Japan. Next comes a filming day at Monza on April 22, with Ferrari still yet to use either of its two permitted filming days in 2026 and keen to generate fresh partner-facing content beyond the post-launch material from January.
Monza is an interesting choice regardless of the camera work. The circuit is among the most punishing on the calendar for energy management in this new era, and Ferrari will welcome any opportunity — even a tightly controlled one — to keep sharpening its understanding of the power unit’s behaviour in high-demand conditions.
That’s the underlying thread here. Hamilton has already pointed to where he believes Mercedes is finding time: straight-line performance, with the W17 appearing to have “a bit more deployment” and “less de-rating at the end of the straights” than its rivals. In other words, Mercedes is getting to the end of the straight with more left in the tank, and in 2026 that’s a brutal advantage to try to mask with corner speed alone.
Ferrari’s response is expected to be visible in Miami. The team had been aiming to introduce upgrades in Bahrain — now gone — and Fred Vasseur has suggested the extra development window has effectively allowed Ferrari to roll out “a package and a half” in Florida. Whether that includes the rotating rear wing that briefly reappeared in China after being sampled in pre-season testing remains unclear, but the direction is obvious: Ferrari needs more efficiency and more usable electrical performance over a lap if it’s going to stop Mercedes dictating the terms.
And that brings us back to Santi.
If Ferrari is about to drop a meaningful upgrade suite on a car that’s already been sensitive to execution, then the last thing Hamilton needs is a brand-new voice in his ear while everyone’s trying to understand how the SF-26 behaves in traffic, on different tyre lives, with different deployment targets. Miami is always a slightly odd weekend anyway — intense heat, a sprint-like feel to the schedule even without a sprint format, and the usual pressure that comes with a high-profile event.
So Ferrari will keep what’s working, even if it was initially framed as temporary.
The open question is what “temporary” actually means now. Michel-Grosjean may still be the longer-term plan; nothing suggests that storyline has gone away. But with Hamilton finally putting points, pace and a podium on the board — and with Ferrari about to lean hard on development to close a gap to a Mercedes team that’s won all three races — stability has suddenly become a competitive tool rather than a convenience.
In 2026, the cars are complicated enough. Ferrari doesn’t need to make Hamilton’s side of the garage harder than it already is. Miami, at least, will be taken with a familiar voice. The rest can wait until the stopwatch says otherwise.
